"Tony Benn!
Now there's a proper loony."

Not really - there's a man with a strong moral viewpoint that guides his politics. He recognises that above everything, people are important and every single man woman and child has the right to education, healthcare, housing, a job and the right to live peacefully within their community.

In the time I spent in the Tory party as a Young Conservative the thing that struck me most was the utter disregard for the less fortunate in society. There was very little understanding of the role of communities in everyday life especially in inner cities and the industrial heartlands; the importance of the role the large employers of the time played in cementing these communities wasn't understood in the slightest, and still isn't even though these communities have all but disappeared, replaced by the pseudo-meritocracy of the service industries and their target-driven, amorphous private-equity owned characterless companies, using people as a resource and giving very little back, and rarely engaging in the local communities they draw on for their staff (before they to flee overseas in the free-market rush to exploit the lower-paid in other countries, leaving people here jobless and frustrated).

The Tories never understood this, New Labour still doesn't and the fact ordinary taxpayers are now paying the inflated wages of those whose greed eventually crashed the system Thatcher so lovingly created and B&B courted is at the very least proof her lassaiz-faire system of economics is a failure.

I for one am glad the old crone lived to see it fail.